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#1679 · Edwin de WitOP, 26 days agoIt's a fair point. I agree it's not a perfect word. I tried many labels and variations, but I ended up with Drives because in my view it contrasted well with Intuition:
Unlike Intuitions, Drives carry the sense of a deep compulsion whose underlying theory is largely unconscious. You’re aware of the feelings they produce as you say, but not of the reasoning behind them. For example, you might know you’re sexually attracted to someone or suddenly feel sad, yet have no idea why — then that’s a Drive.
If you do have some sense of why you’re feeling a certain way and can roughly express it in words, it’s an Intuition. If you can fully articulate it in words, it’s a Statement. Statements can also produce feelings. For example, if your core value is that non‑coercion, you might feel angry when someone disciplines their child in an immoral way — here, the Statement (often paired with Intuitions or Drives) is producing the feeling of anger.
I agree the main shortcoming of Drive is that it’s often taken to mean innate or hardwired knowledge. I haven’t found a better alternative, so I make it clear when explaining the concept that Drives can also arise from habitualized knowledge. Deutch (in this podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e2LWxaqQUQ) seems to also support this way of defining new terminology
If you want to say something new the terminology you use is going to be unsuited for it because the terminology is going to be adapted to previous ways of thinking um what you can do is just invent your own terminology that's a terrible idea because no one will understand what you're saying and secondly it is subject to the same problem that it will only represent accurately fairly accurately your thoughts at a particular time when you're addressing a new criticism it will no longer be suitable so I think what people usually do and what is done in physics and what's done in philosophy what Popper did is to use the nearest existing term and be very careful to explain that one means something new by it.
If you have alternate suggestions, I'm of course eager to hear them!
Statements can also produce feelings.
I don’t think statements produce feelings. I think values produce feelings, regardless of whether those values are held consciously or unconsciously, explicitly or inexplicitly:
Emotions are produced by man's [value] premises, held consciously or subconsciously, explicitly or implicitly.
By the way, I wonder if this is where Deutsch got the different categories. He’s read Rand.